“Welcome to the fucking Badlands!” declares Halsey, her address met – like everything the 20-year-old New Jerseyan does this evening – with a wall of ear-splicing scream. Badlands is Halsey’s debut album, a collection of defiant pop whose success (it charted at number two in the US and nine here) was shouldered by the singer’s rabid internet fandom. It’s a following that dates back to 2012, when Halsey made a niche name for herself with a catty parody of Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble that damned the singer’s relationship with Harry Styles, and gained more serious traction last year, when she self-released her first single Ghost.
Nowadays, Halsey appears as a gently alternative pop star, with Badlands ostensibly a psychoscape of alienation and hurt. Tonight she is aesthetically black and blue at least, in a dark leotard, her hair a cyan crop. Lyrically, Halsey deals with the unspecific cynicism and thwarted individuality that decades of guitar music has left beyond cliche (“You’re part of a machine, you are not a human being,” goes opening gambit Gasoline), but can still be legitimised – as it seems tonight – by the pained chorusing of a devoted young crowd.
Her performance may feature all the signifiers of a troubled mind (tritely smashing a cymbal with a drumstick; parading around with a black cloth over her head; squatting), but this disquiet isn’t really what informs Halsey’s songs. Despite borrowing cues from more brooding forms – Hurricane, for example, has the skittering beats of the Weeknd’s indie R&B – the ultimate goal seems to be the uncomplicated bombast of her old foe Taylor Swift, something she regularly achieves.
For her encore, Halsey reappears with a strip of black tape over her mouth. As she peels it off to sing again, it’s a gesture that hammers home her pose – one which, it feels, her largely conservative songs haven’t given her the right to strike.
